“... lurid. The most famous is the 1979 movie, funded by Bob Guccione and Penthouse, with a script by Gore Vidal. It starred Malcolm McDowell as a convincingly bonkers young emperor, backed up by a group of A-list actors, including Gielgud and Helen Mirren, who were said to have been unaware of the soft porn enterprise in which they were involved. (Did they ...”

“... ecclesiastical offices of the New York Times – unroll in the pensive, slightly irked manner of Gore Vidal expounding on the verandah, taking inventory of civilisation’s rapid cookie crumble. For all his purported solipsism, Ellis has proved to be a skilful interviewer as well, with a varied roster of guests including the directors Walter Hill and ...”

“... Starring Fast Planes, Bikes and Women’, the much derided Playboy advertises a long piece by Gore Vidal on God and the state. Jack runs a piece about British wrestling in which even the writer seems completely bored with the subject: I ask Keith to tell me the difference between the British wrestler and the new breed of Americans who seem to have ...”

“... is at least better than treating him as God: ‘(I get memory flash of cable sent to me by Gore Vidal when he agreed to accept my younger daughter as godchild: “Always a godfather, never a god.”)’ The Johnny Carson profile, in which this by now well-known mot appears, shows brilliant powers of observation, but it can also be read for its ...”

“... of things previously unsaid, including the normalisation of gay chauvinisms. He dedicated it to Gore Vidal, and wrote to him, Bucknell tells us, implying that this was the kind of novel they’d been trying to write since 1947, ‘a beautiful work of art that was also a powerful piece of propaganda presenting a well-adjusted homosexual to a mainstream ...”

“... hard, the ghost in the art-world machine. ‘A white rabbit’, ‘a saint’, ‘a born loser’ (Gore Vidal), ‘a window-decorator type’ (Truman Capote): it really doesn’t matter how you describe Warhol. He could have been anyone, any intelligent watcher and waiter in Manhattan. And his cultural coup was astonishing. He annexed the production of ...”

“... in 1987: ‘I have been standing for PEACE and MR GORBACHEV with Gregory Peck and Yoko Ono and Gore Vidal and Fay Weldon. Where were you?!’ 26 September. And as I am correcting the proofs of this piece comes the death of my next-door neighbour, the publisher Colin Haycraft. He was like Lindsay A. in many ways, standing at the same ironic angle to ...”

“... opposition to American imperialism is sustained chiefly through such US exports as Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Michael Moore. But although his recent examples come from the war on terror, the political development they represent is not, according to Agamben, peculiar to the United States under the Bush presidency. It is part of a wider change in ...”

“... of his language. To Harold Bloom, Updike is ‘a minor writer with a major style’. Gore Vidal thinks that Updike ‘describes to no purpose’. James Wood complains that Updike fills his characters’ thoughts with showy phrases that don’t suit them or their situations; and that the ‘very pretty ribbons’ of Updike’s style are a ...”

“... with eight or so concerned onlookers (some of them, like Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Gore Vidal, younger candidates for sagedom) are cut and rearranged to give a chronological sense of each career, but also a whiff of the blood and cordite of intellectual warfare. The purpose is not quite literary biography or portraiture, for which a more ...”

“... resist the idea, Miss Didion’s talent is primarily discursive in tendency. As is the case with Gore Vidal, the essays are far more interesting than the fiction. The novels get taken up, with the enthusiasm, the unanimity, the relief which American critics and readers often show when they discover a new and distinctly OK writer. Miss Didion is already ...”

“... door), and there was freedom in being reachable only by letter (phones were for dramatic events). Gore Vidal said Bouvier lost her virginity in a lift to a writer for the Paris Review, someone else said she went out with an assistant to the prime minister, who took her riding in the Bois de Boulogne. We can’t know more until Bouvier’s papers are ...”

“... this thanks to the constant backing of the United States, whose support is the consequence of what Gore Vidal in his gem of a Preface to Shahak’s book describes as ‘the serene corruption of American polities’. As Armstrong fairly says, the Israelis have not been the worst conquerors of Jerusalem. That distinction belongs to the Crusaders, who ...”

“... office politics). In America, the writers who went off to war were younger, apprentice meteors. Gore Vidal wrote a small, cool, personal book in Williwaw; Norman Mailer attempted in The Naked and the Dead to write the Big Novel about the war and ended up writing a kind of pastiche, a strange hybrid of modernist ambition and postmodernist decentredness ...”

“... tightrope-walking artists – comedians, gymnasts, racing drivers, and cultural commentators like Gore Vidal) rather than in high art. Modernism has ruined high art for him, largely because it has abandoned its appeal to popular recognition in favour of a kind of self-sealing historicism. But he cannot quite keep his categories watertight. His love of ...”